Candyfloss & Dreams

Author: Kat Candyfloss

  • How To Make Fairy Dough

    How To Make Fairy Dough

    Kids are pretty hard to entertain all the time and so I find I am always looking for something for us to do at home. I wanted to learn how to make a quick and easy play dough for my daughter now that we have more time together and I’m working at home.

    A scroll through Facebook brought me to this wonderful blog Laughing Kids Learn with this page in particular…a recipe for fairy dough using only three ingredients. Brilliant, because I am pretty rubbish at doing the home making/baking kinda stuff so this sounded fab and I couldn’t wait to try it out with Mini Kat.

    Making Fairy Dough is so simple and great to do together. The measurements are in ‘cups’ and we have a measurement that allows us to do cups but the recipe is pretty flexible in that you can add more if it needs more.
    You will need one cup of conditioner, 2.5 cups of cornflour and a little food colouring. You can even add a little glitter if you want to make it really sparkly, like we did. I didn’t get many great pics of the progress but do head over to the blog I found the activity on so you can see fantastic images of what the dough is supposed to look like! Our experience is below.

    Mini KAT ready to make fairy dough with apron, bowl and the needed ingredients of cornflour, food colouring and hair conditioner. We also added some glitter for extra fairyness.

    Mini Kat absolutely loved getting hands on with this one. We used the Alberto Balsam pomegranate shampoo because it was pink in colour and smelled really nice and fruity.

    Mini KAT mixing the cornflour and conditioner together

    Getting ready to knead the dough

    Mini Kat got really involved which is just great as she was ale to feel the texture changing from wet to crumbly as she added the cornflour to the conditioner and gave it a good mix.

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    You need to give the dough a really good knead here and make sure the ingredients are fully combined. Then if you need to make it a little more wet and stick together better, add a touch more conditioner, if you want to dry it out, use more cornflour.

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    Mini Kat absolutely loved this activity and we need to do it again, perhaps with some different colours and different smells. It probably hasn’t turned out perfect, but it was our first attempt at doing something special together and I am looking forward to the summer months being full of fun activities for us to do both inside and out. I will be going back to Laughing Kids Learn to check out more activities for us to do together.

    Three Ingredient Fairy Dough for Kids

     

  • Thai Style Coconut Soup

    One of my favourite places to eat in my hometown of Andover is Siam Orchid which is a tiny hidden gem of a Thai Resturant. The food they make is fresh, tasty, vibrant and delicious. The staff are friendly and it’s pretty reasonably priced to be honest. We haven’t been for a while but when we do go we opt for the all you can eat menu which is four amazing courses for about £20 per person and you can have as much as you like per course. The courses include starters, shredded duck, soup and then a main course. My favourite on the menu is the Coconut Soup which comes with either chicken, prawns or vegetables. It is delicious. I have been back several times trying a few new things but always enjoying the soup.

    Just after Christmas I went around clearing my kitchen cupboards and moving things around and found a recipe book for soups and amongst these recipes was a Thai-style coconut chicken noodle soup. Yesterday I decided to take it upon myself to try this recipe out and see if it tasted the same. None of the ingredients seemed like they would be very expensive and some of them are key ingredients in other Asian flavours. I am looking forward to trying new foods this year as part of project 52. I did have to adapt the recipe a little as couldn’t find Spring Onions, Coriander, Lemongrass or Lime Leaves and I substituted the chicken for turkey, just because it’s cheaper and used the grind of a lime and a lemon, plus the juice. I also used dry noodles rather than the straight to wok kind and didn’t make my own stock but even with those few shortcuts it was still pretty much made fresh and was very, very tasty.

    Thai Style Soup with Chicken and Red Chilli
    Elli O.

    To make you need:
    2tbsps sunflower oil,
    3 shallots finely chopped,
    4 green chillies seeded and chopped,
    2 tsp grated fresh root ginger (I used ‘sushi ginger’),
    2 garlic cloves crushed,
    2 lemongrass stalks chopped,
    4 kaffir lime leaves shredded,
    400ml coconut milk,
    800 ml chicken stock,
    2 skinless boneless chicken breasts cut into bite size pieces or your choice of protein – I used turkey
    85g baby corn quartered lengthways,
    200g fine wheat noodles,
    1-2tbsp Thai fish sauce (smells a bit like feet – but doesn’t taste bad, I promise!)
    Juice of 1 lime,
    bunch of spring onions sliced
    and a handful of fresh coriander.

    Method
    I added the oil to a saucepan and then added the chopped garlic and shallots with the turkey whilst cooking the noodles in the stock – I used a stock cube to make this with boiling water. I then added the chillies, ginger and vegetables to the chicken or turkey, juice and rind of the lemon and lime and once the noodles were fully cooked I added the stock and noodles to the turkey.

    I then added the fish sauce and coconut milk and gave it a good stir keeping it simmering the whole time. All together it probably took about 45 minutes to prepare and cook and I was incredibly pleased with the result.

    It tasted very nice and I went on to have seconds, and then thirds later that night. Ours was enough for about four servings however the recipe can be very easily adapted to serve more people. I’m going to experiment a bit more and then come up with a perfect Thai menu to share with some family and friends.

    Thai Style Chicken Chilli and Coconut Soup